90% Of Businesses To Utilize The Private Cloud Network In The Next Decade

Public clouds (e.g., Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud Drive) are financially efficient, easy to manage, pay-as-you-go cloud services available to all members of the public, either for free or for a small monthly cost. The public cloud has given individuals and businesses, big and small, resources for storing and sharing data.

PMC Telecom, trading since 1991, has noticed considerable demand for cloud-based services. Luke Cropper, head of hosted, says PMC Telecom’s customers have always required phone systems; but they are no longer happy with simple plug-and-play handsets. They want services available only through cloud-based services, such as the freedom to use any device to answer a call. New technology such as hosted VoIP enables customers to advance their telecom solutions in a way that traditional systems cannot rival.

The public cloud has paved the way for the future of telecommunications and data technology and has the benefit of being available to multiple businesses and members of the public, but it’s limited by being a one-size-fits-all model. As the cloud-based technology hype dies down and it is no longer seen as an exciting, innovative novelty, businesses are beginning to request more to suit the needs of their specific company.

The private cloud – much like the public cloud – offers numerous benefits, including scalability, flexibility, and security, with the added bonus of being solely dedicated to one specific company or business. This means that companies can take full advantage of a tailor-made cloud service.

A global survey conducted by cloud solutions provider QualiSystems revealed that 30% of workplace cloud data usage is managed through private cloud systems, with a further 10% predicted to switch from public to private in the next year.

The initial cost of using a private cloud network is higher than that of its public counterpart. However companies can save up to 50% on long-term costs by opting to go private, with operating expenses often significantly lower than public cloud costs (as seen in this case study in the International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology).

The capital expenditure on switching to a private cloud service is high compared to the initial switch to public cloud, which is often free of charge. However, as the case study above shows, the operating expenses of a private cloud network over a three-year period are nearly a quarter of the costs of public cloud operating expenses, bringing the three-year total cost of using the private cloud to almost half of the cost of using the public cloud.

Cost is a huge influence when it comes to decision making for big businesses, however the leading drawback of using a public cloud service is the security risk potential that comes with a shared environment. Logically, a private network is far more security efficient that a shared public one. Therefore, more big businesses with sensitive data are making the switch to private in order to tighten security of their data.

The requirements of the ever-growing development and operations field are becoming greater all the time, with cloud providers struggling to keep up. The QualiSystems survey revealed that cloud service providers don’t have the ability to meet the demand of IaaS (infrastructure as a service) within an efficient timescale.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned fail to deliver IaaS within the same day that it is required; with the majority of companies needing almost a week to meet the requirements of their users.

Over 90% of businesses now use a type of cloud-based service for their company needs, an impressive statistic considering that the cloud only really became popular in 2002 thanks to Amazon Web Services and furthered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006. Its popularity is unsurprising since the technology comes with so many benefits that companies would be foolish not to adapt their systems to maximize business potential. The private cloud is simply the new wave of technology that is heavily weighted with numerous benefits.

From this, its predictable that (just like with the first generation of cloud-based services), 90% of businesses will be utilizing a private cloud network in the next decade.

IoT and Industry 4.0 may have more impact on the future of your business than anything else on earth. Learn what the experts this means for business in Myth-Busting: The Networked Economy.

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About Andre Smith

An Internet, Marketing and E-Commerce specialist with several years of experience in the industry. He has watched as the world of online business has grown and adapted to new technologies, and he has made it his mission to help keep businesses informed and up to date.

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10 Must-Read Supply Chain Blog Posts Of 2016

Learning is a cumulative process. Every day, we gain new insight and build upon the lessons we’ve learned in the past. We then apply this ever-growing knowledge to improve our personal and professional lives.

In 2016, my colleagues and I dedicated countless hours to developing and publishing thought leadership aimed at educating readers on the latest innovations in supply chain. We tackled topics such as digital transformation, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, individualized products, and customer-centricity – all in an effort to help organizations optimize their current supply chain operations.

As we begin preparing similarly insightful content for 2017, we wanted to highlight some of our top-performing Digitalist blogs from 2016.

Our hope is that you consume this wisdom, combine it with the invaluable content we promise to deliver in the forthcoming year, and reimagine your supply chain for success in today’s ever-evolving digital economy.

Enjoy!

Why 3D-Printed Food Just Transformed Your Supply Chain

It’s not surprising that 3D printing is revolutionizing the production process. For companies to successfully leverage 3D printing, it’s crucial that they reimagine their existing supply chain processes. Learn how the food industry could benefit from 3D printing, and find out which four key drivers are enabling 3D printing in the era of extended supply chain.

Zara’s Agile Supply Chain Is The Source Of Its Competitive Advantage

Zara is among the brightest stars in the fast-fashion industry. With an agile supply chain in place, the company is able to adapt couture designs, manufacture items, and distribute products to stores a mere two to three weeks after they first appear on catwalks. Discover how Zara’s agile supply chain strategy differentiates the company from its competitors.

How Your Supply Chain Can Drive Digital Transformation For Your Business [Infographic]

In order to meet today’s demand for customized products and personalized shopping experiences, it’s imperative that manufacturers begin transforming their supply chains with digital transformation. Explore how digitized extended supply chains can help your organization better align product design, manufacturing, and service to achieve the customer-centricity your business needs to thrive.

Chief Supply Chain Officer: The Most Transformative Executive In The C-Suite

Fundamental drivers such as individualized products and customer-centricity are upending traditional supply chains. Find out how a chief supply chain officer who knows how to respond can transform your supply and demand networks as well as your company’s competitive position in the marketplace.

4 Ways Digitalization Is Transforming R&D

The digital economy begins and ends with the customer. Customers are more empowered, so companies need to become more customer-centric. And nowhere is that more true than in R&D. From innovation, to production, to logistics, manufacturers are seeing their operations revolutionized by digital technologies. Take a look at four key ways digitalization is transforming R&D.

How Digital Supply Chains Are Changing Business

Customer demands change. Supply disruptions occur. In order to succeed in today’s digital economy, your supply chain must be agile enough to respond to these ever-evolving circumstances. Learn how a digital supply chain can enable your business to adapt and react in real time, providing your enterprise with the opportunity to better serve its customers and separate from the competition.

Omnichannel Leaders Widen The Gap Through Customer-Centricity

SCM World research shows an interesting correlation between the value of customer data and an organization’s omnichannel capabilities. Moreover, companies that possess “good” omnichannel processes and/or technologies tend to place a better emphasis on customer-centricity. Discover how omnichannel leaders leverage these strengths to improve omnichannel sales, fulfillment, returns, inventory visibility, and integrated planning.

Creating A Customer-Centric Supply Chain

Today’s consumers are better connected, more informed, and, as a result, more demanding than ever. This is transforming the way businesses sense and shape demand, design and manufacture products, and deliver goods. Uncover the importance of driving business processes centered around consumers and their constantly rising expectations.

Is Your Supply Chain Ready For The ‘End of Silicon’?

Think resource scarcity doesn’t apply to your business? Think again. Today’s most forward-looking manufacturers need to begin thinking about what we refer to as “the end of silicon.” Explore how your company can respond to potential resource scarcity throughout the supply chain.

How Harley-Davidson And Other Companies Deliver Individualized Products

The concepts of assembly lines and mass production have remained vital in supply chain for well over a century. But to win in today’s digital economy, businesses must shun the technologies of yesteryear and embrace the innovations of today. Discover how you can digitize your existing supply chain operations and satisfy your customers with individualized products.

Stay tuned to the Digitalist throughout 2017 for all the latest trends, developments, and emerging solutions impacting the world of supply chain. In the meantime, visit SAP to learn how an extended supply chain can help your business be more connected, intelligent, responsive, and predictive than ever before.

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﻿﻿Reinventing the Fashion Business Model

If you’re a Project Runway enthusiast, you know that “in fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” Host and model Heidi Klum speaks to the relevance of the contestants’ fashions on the show, but it also applies to the central theme three experts discussed on a recent SAP Game-Changers Radio broadcast titled Reinventing the Fashion Business Model.

The panelists believe that most fashion brands know they have to innovate in order to meet the needs of their customers, and the most successful ones are blurring the lines in their supply chains and weaving customer data into the fabric of their business strategies.

Branding disparities are part of the fashion retailer’s biggest challenge today. Many companies are trading products under different names, cataloguing products with different style numbers, and communicating to their customers in slightly different ways. Brands need to be close to their customers, and one of the ways to cultivate that relationship is by having digital at the core of their business models.

For Jeff Goldberg, managing director, North America retail, at Accenture, this means brands must have “consistent, harmonized information across your company [that’s] connected in a way that’s easy to communicate and collaborate with customers, suppliers, and ever more important, your associates.”

Good infrastructure isn’t just about ease in communication or in other tactical methods of connecting with the customer. It’s about getting the data to help businesses do it in the most effective way. “The more we can actually get one truth and systems and processes and data that’s simple, then tell the story, then people have more time to actually work on analyzing to come up with better ideas,” said Matt Marcotte, founder of M2 Collaborative. For him, it means businesses that invest in their infrastructure and understand the data they collect will be freed up to do more innovative things that meet their customers’ needs.

The source of one truth has to be integrated into every part of the business, from manufacturing to purchase, with the customer at the center of every decision along the way. Businesses need to have “one view” of their customers through their supply chains.

“[Brands that do] can truly unite that customer sentiment, that customer feedback on the runway, at the fashion campaign, all the way back to the supply chain so they can be much more responsive and deliver that experience much more quickly,” said Matt Laukaitis, managing director, SAP retail in the U.S. “Customers want to make sure that the brands they choose to shop with understand who they are, and the brand needs to make sure that they are extremely relevant to that customer in the moment that customer is making a decision or thinking about making a purchase.”

But what happens when the customer wants to make that purchase immediately? Brands have to be on the ready to meet that demand, especially in light of new players in the fashion retail space that are agile enough to keep up in the world of the Primarks, Veras, and Etsy shops. At their core, businesses that are doing this are “reinventing the supply chain,” according to Laukaitis.

The profile of fashion brands that will still be around after this season to walk the runway?

“The companies that really understand their customers, that know how to use data to tell stories, to create personalization, customization, a relationship with that customer, those are the ones that will win,” said Marcotte.

Fashion brands that use data to create personalized interactions with customers will thrive

The fashion retail model will change again with developments in augmented reality, among other trends. What does that mean for fashionistas coveting a faux leather jacket from a recent runway show? The fabrics may one day soon be grown in a lab which helps get the product to the customer quicker, according to Marcotte.

Everything You Know About Leadership Is Wrong

Companies that begin life digitally operate differently from the incumbents they threaten and unseat. Employees at digital companies don’t waste time gathering and analyzing information; they use live data to make decisions. They don’t need to wade through organizational hierarchies to get permission to act; their leaders explain business goals and then empower them to use their best judgment.

To compete, incumbent companies have to transform not only decision-making processes and hierarchies that have hardened over decades but also the nature of leadership itself. The leadership strategies and behaviors that drove success in the knowledge economy aren’t sufficient to navigate a successful transition to the digital economy.

Two-thirds of Global 2000 CEOs will center their business strategies on digital transformation by the end of 2017, according to IDC. But few business executives today have the leadership mindset or skills necessary for these strategies to succeed, according to the Leaders 2020 study conducted recently by SAP, Oxford Economics, and McChrystal Group. The study found that only 16% of executives are ready to lead their companies through this transformation.

Leaders must lead differently if their companies are to transition to the digital economy and reap its rewards. In 10 years, for example, 75% of the companies that were listed on the S&P 500 Index in 2012 will have been replaced, according to a study by Innosight. Meanwhile, global competition is heating up. Rising disposable income in emerging economies has sparked the advent of new rivals—and in a survey by consulting firm Accenture, 70% of marketers in those economies expressed confidence in their ability to execute a digital business transformation. In mature economies, the figure was just 38%.

But it’s not too late to learn the essentials of digital leadership.

Communicate the Digital Mission

Fostering an organization whose employees have the skills, tools, authority, and information they need to make decisions in the moment begins with leaders who can formulate and communicate the digital mission. Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, understands the forces driving digital transformation. Under his guidance, AT&T’s lines of business have expanded—both organically and through acquisitions—to include extensive digital operations, like DirecTV and potentially, as of press time, Time Warner, according to The New York Times. So even as AT&T continues to compete for market share against established and startup telecommunications providers, the company is going head-to-head against digitally based companies like Amazon and Google.

Every business must become digital and work in the cloud, but the change doesn’t merely mean making acquisitions, buying new technology, and rewriting org charts. A new digital workforce is needed as well to meet the transformation challenge. And like the companies they serve, the members of this new workforce will have to develop new abilities and prepare to take on new roles.

That reality is the impetus for Stephenson’s ambitious initiative to transform his company by transforming his team. Through a program launched nearly three years ago, AT&T is underwriting education and professional development opportunities for employees who are willing to pursue the studies on their own time. Those who take advantage of the offer can learn new computing skills that align with the company’s blueprint for digital transformation.

AT&T’s education plan shows the extent to which data is driving a profound change in employees’ daily tasks, functions, and core value to the company. Until recently, businesses sought knowledge workers who were capable of reviewing, assessing, analyzing, and disseminating data in support of decision making. But in the digital economy, companies must be able to respond in the moment to customer, market, and competitive changes. Reviewing masses of data and following traditional hierarchical decision-making processes defeats that goal. To succeed and, in truth, to survive, companies must have that data available when they need it and make a decision in the right moment.

Invest in Understanding How Work Gets Done

With that in mind, digital leaders must invest in understanding how work gets done and then commit to adjusting processes, deploying the right technology to support those processes, and measuring what adds value for customers and, therefore, to the bottom line. Yet only half of the executives surveyed by Oxford Economics rated their companies’ senior leaders as highly proficient in using the technology necessary for transformation.

Digital Leadership in Hard Numbers

Executives who have already established themselves as digital leaders demonstrate the value of their initiatives in hard numbers, according to the Oxford Economics study Leaders 2020. For example, their companies are much more likely to sustain top financial performance in terms of both revenue and profitability. Where leadership has embraced digital, companies:

Are 38% more likely to report strong revenue and profit growth

Have more mature strategies and programs for hiring skilled talent

Report one and a half times more effective collaboration, which contributes to productivity

What’s more, becoming digitally savvy isn’t enough. Leaders’ aptitude for cultivating teams and work environments that can make good use of technology is also essential. Indeed, nearly 80% of the companies considered farthest along in digital maturity make data-driven decisions, according to the Oxford Economics study (see Digital Leadership in Hard Numbers). Meanwhile, 53% of respondents were found to be clinging to old-school decision-making styles and failing to map decisions to strategy. As a result, only 46% qualified as equipped to make decisions in real time.

Lead by Simplifying

Digital leaders make it a priority to continually simplify processes and decision-making procedures to reduce institutionalized complexity and bureaucracy. These impediments take a real toll. A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that organizational complexity costs businesses up to 10% of profits. Flattening organizational hierarchies and encouraging transparency and organization-wide inclusivity in the decision-making process can help erase such losses, according to the Oxford Economics study.

Achieving these goals doesn’t require a committee. Empowering people at lower levels to make business-critical decisions based on available data has a natural flattening effect on the hierarchy. And as individuals and the enterprise as a whole become accustomed to having access to real-time data that speeds responsiveness, decision making becomes distributed across the organization.

That doesn’t automatically mean that the organizational pyramid is dead. Rather, it empowers employees, the organization, and leadership by placing responsibility for individual responses and actions in the hands of the people best equipped to carry them out, take ownership of the results, and ensure their success. This key characteristic distinguishes digital workers from knowledge workers: they have access to the data necessary to drive the right decisions at the right time, regardless of where they appear on the organizational chart. This not only empowers people at lower levels but also eases the bureaucratic burden on upper management, which is then freer to focus its time and energy on leading the organization forward instead of directing its day-to-day and even minute-by-minute activities.

Lead by Getting Ahead of the Customer

Creating an organization that’s capable of capturing data and making decisions in the moment can transform customer relationships. Besides responding to immediate customer needs, digitally transformed organizations can also predict emerging requirements, even before the customer is fully conscious of them.

To achieve this, digital leaders must be able to view digital in terms of its ability to support innovation: to make it possible for the business to deliver an array of services and advantages that it wasn’t possible to deliver before.

“The challenge is to not ask the question, ‘How does this affect my business?’ That’s inherently a defensive, firm-centric question,” says David Rogers, author of The Digital Transformation Playbook and a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School. “Instead, firms need to look at every new technology and digital capability and ask, ‘How might this allow us to offer new forms of value to our customers that we could not have done in the past?’ And be continuously looking.”

Being plugged into digital’s power to transform customer relationships thus allows an executive to evolve into a digital leader with the vision and the tools necessary to conceive and implement continuous innovation.

Concentrate on Team Dynamics and Employee Engagement

Millennial leadership is well suited to understand the human side of digital transformation. Digital leaders of older generations must recognize the importance of inviting and acting on input from Millennials, which is essential to inspiring them to perform at their best—and to achieving the overall goals of digital transformation.

Digital leaders must also understand that encouraging diversity in their workforce isn’t simply a matter of fairness; it’s also a source of competitive advantage. Leaders who build diverse organizations have more engaged, productive employees, as well as higher levels of innovation, according to the Oxford Economics study. This in turn leads to better bottom-line results. Companies that reported higher revenue and profitability growth were more likely to cite the positive impact of diversity on their numbers.

Despite this, the study found that only 60% of companies have adequate programs to ensure that they are developing a digital workforce. The shortfall is hurting companies’ ability to hire and retain talent: only 53% say they are successful in attracting qualified applicants.

This problem will only get worse as Baby Boomers exit the workforce. Digital leaders will be increasingly pressured to maintain stability and continuity in their workforces. The challenge will be especially difficult for companies that lag in meeting the expectations of professionals who have entered the workforce in the era of the gig economy. They expect to make numerous career moves and don’t necessarily see length of tenure as a priority.

Thus, companies need processes for bringing new staff members up to speed as quickly as possible while optimizing their productivity, encouraging them to make constructive contributions to the business, and motivating them to deliver their best performance. They must also develop programs for continuous learning and job rotations to engage and retain workers who may not otherwise remain with the company as long as they would have in past generations.

Address the Generation Gap

Millennials and Generation Z have different expectations of what it means to be an employee and how to use technology than other generations do. They expect collaboration across the hierarchy, which is important to keeping them engaged with the organization and with their personal passions. Fostering a sense of meaning within the workplace, then, is another element of digital leadership; leaders must make the company a place where employees feel as engaged and rewarded as they can be and can do their best work.

In this respect and many others, most businesses are contending with a generation gap. The Oxford Economics study found that in comparison to older executives, Millennial executives have a much more pessimistic view of their organization’s ability to perform well in such key areas as using technology to achieve competitive advantage, collaborating internally, inspiring employees, and fostering an organizational culture that promotes feedback and reduces bureaucracy. In addition, the Millennials are more conscious of—and place a premium on—diversity and its benefits. Addressing that generational disconnect is key to digital leadership.

When today’s mid- and late-career executives entered the workforce, it was understood that younger workers invested the early years of their professional lives paying their dues. But that model no longer works in a market in which a company’s future depends on an approach to digital transformation that comes most naturally to younger executives. And those executives will not invest themselves and their expertise in companies that fail to recognize and respect Millennial workplace priorities.

Help Employees Address Future Challenges

Digital transformation isn’t just altering employees’ expectations of their careers. It’s also remaking jobs and what work itself entails. In response to a survey by consulting firm Cap Gemini, 77% of companies reported that they saw digital skill gaps as the chief obstacle to their digital transformation.

Their concerns are well founded. Oxford University examined 702 job descriptions across all job types and found that 47% were likely to be replaced by technology within a decade. Another 19% were moderately likely to be replaced. With that in mind, part of the leadership challenge in digital transformation is anticipating how people will work in this world and how artificial intelligence, robots, and people will be integrated into a new and more efficient workforce. How will people interact with these digital forces in the workplace? What will it mean in human terms?

Digital leaders can’t expect employees to keep up with these changes on their own: things are simply moving too quickly. AT&T’s Stephenson recognizes this. The New York Times reported that the company’s digital transformation is projected to make 30% of current jobs obsolete by 2020. That’s why, to get ahead of that challenge, Stephenson ordered the creation of AT&T’s training program, which includes an extensive curriculum of online and classroom courses.

This approach illustrates a key characteristic of digital leaders: the ability to think conscientiously about where their companies are headed, what skills their people will need, and how they can help them develop the skills they’ll need as their roles evolve. Digital leaders are also able to articulately communicate to employees where the world is headed so that they are motivated to get there and be productive now and in the future.

Unleash a New Generation of Executives

Companies can no longer afford to delay recognizing the digital sea change that is transforming decision making and the capacity to respond in real time to challenges and opportunities. Led by Millennial executives, the new digital workforce is ready to spark unprecedented performance improvements in organizations that do not constrain their ability to communicate, collaborate, and contribute. Digital leaders are devising strategies for harnessing their energy, enthusiasm, and innate understanding of digital capacities to achieve higher levels of productivity and profitability. The remaining leaders face a choice: embrace this change or get left behind. D!

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About Michael Rander

Michael Rander is the Global Research Director for Future Of Work at SAP. He is an experienced project manager, strategic and competitive market researcher, operations manager as well as an avid photographer, athlete, traveler and entrepreneur. Share your thoughts with Michael on Twitter @michaelrander.

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What Does Blockchain Mean To The CFO?

In my previous blogs, I’ve stated that CFOs need to play a strong, active role as an independent challenger for the business while assessing risks – balancing risk and opportunity for the business. I’ve also covered changes to our role as digitization begins to envelop our organizations. The digital economy will impact many things, that we can be sure of.

In the digital economy, collaboration is increasingly important, and the task of the CFO is to establish this collaboration role, and someone needs to establish collaborative digital finance processes and safeguard their effectiveness and efficiency. In many cases, CFOs have taken that role. Looking to next year, there’s a huge expectation that the technology known as “blockchain” will gain greater prominence in practical business applications, and I believe CFOs can and should enter the picture of this discussion early on. It’s not the realm of the technologists alone, and many are pointing towards blockchain as an underpinning of a digital economy.

The blockchain movement and its accompanying technological capabilities are incredibly intriguing, and a quick Google search delivers about 416,000 results, underscoring the interest. If we can build use cases and applications, blockchain can radically change the way we do business. As a CFO, I need to be mindful of risks, and some associated with this technology are difficult to comprehend upon first reflection. However, as I wrote previously, this is typical of the CFO in the digital economy. Both on the business and compliance sides, we are able to leverage traditional skill sets and our knowledge while stepping into unknown territory in both areas at the same time.

Singapore has announced the city state’s central bank will explore blockchain by launching a pilot project with the country’s stock exchange and eight local and foreign banks to use the technology for interbank payments. While blockchain technology, which emerged from bitcoin, is expected to draw interest by banks and other centralized institutions, it’s expected that companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google will be early adopters as well.

Being mindful of risks

Given that a lot of information is shared in a blockchain, I wonder what it would do to the system – beginning with fraud and going onward along the risk chain – if and how someone could break into it. I’m sure there’s a good answer – maybe hackers could hardly or never access all of information, given its distributed ledgers. But my point here is that the role as a CFO is to assess the risk and benefit. The latter would include an analysis of the energy footprint of blockchain technology. Is the hardware used sufficiently and is it energy efficient? Are the algorithms computationally efficient in this regard?

Blockchain promises a huge benefit because it increases how we do business and the speed at which it can be conducted. It promises to eliminate the intermediaries and bring new life back to some professions. Some of the technology’s early adopters are public audit firms, and their perspective is in the public interest. I saw a presentation from a utilities company, and it was mind boggling what they’re exploring with blockchain. They can see a case extending collaboration and interaction all the way to the customer in a way they’ve been previously unable to achieve.

From the finance perspective, there’s a limit to optimizing processes and the number of people involved. Even with full robotics, oversight is needed, i.e., someone who watches the robot. When we reach those limits, we turn to technology to help increase volumes and transaction processes. I see a lot of potential for blockchain in this regard, with new, associated business models that have potential.

A hot topic in financial services

At I recent forum for financial services, I co-hosted a dinner where blockchain was the topic. It was amazing to see how people had picked up on the topic, and there were a lot of questions. Many had similar questions about exploring the risks and benefits, and I think it’s fair that everyone took away the sense that they need to keep their eyes on and learn more about it.

Consistently, I see a lot of people taking note, especially those close to the financial market or treasury. Predictably, IT departments are keenly curious, but I think CFOs need to step up their game and begin looking more closely, forming points of view to guide their businesses. It ties in with traditional CFO skills like business modeling, risk and compliance, and advising the business. This remains at the core of our role.

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About Matthias Heiden

Dr. Matthias Heiden, senior vice president, regional CFO, Middle and Eastern Europe (MEE), is responsible for the field finance organization of MEE. In this role, he supports the organization in managing P&L, continuously driving strategic finance transformation initiatives initiated by Corporate Finance together with the other regional CFOs. This team helps improve business-related processes and supports the Market Unit CFOs in their role as business facilitator and transformation agent.